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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Swiss Thoreau 



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CAROLINE C. LEIGHTON 

AUTHOR OF "LIFE AT PUGET SOUND" 




BOSTON MDCCCXC 
LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 

10 MILK STREET NEXT "THE OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE" 

NEW YORK CHAS. T. DILLINGHAM 

71S AND 720 BROADWAY 




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1 



Copyright, 1889, 
By Lee and Shefard. 



A SWISS THOREAU 



Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva, 
in September, 1821, his ancestors having left 
Languedoc for that place on the revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes. He was a delicate 
child, of sensitive disposition. At twelve 
years of age he had lost both his. parents, and 
was separated at that time from his two sis- 
ters, who were his only near relatives. He 
was educated in the gloomy Calvinistic be- 
lief, with which the whole atmosphere of the 
place was impregnated. After completing his 
course of study at the Academy, he entered 
upon his Wanderjahre in Europe, studying 
also at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he 
came under the influence of German philoso- 
phy, and drank deep of its mysticism. Hegel's 



4 A SWISS THOREAU 

ideas were everywhere discussed, and Scho- 
penhauer was beginning to attract attention. 
Released from the restraints and convention- 
alities of the stiff and formal Geneva, his 
powers expanded. The eminent French 
critic, Edmond Scherer, who saw him at this 
time, said that he seemed to him " like a man 
to have the world at his feet, so laden was 
he with science, yet wearing his knowledge 
so lightly, with so extraordinary a power of 
sustained and concentrated thought, and so 
passionate a delight in the exercise of it." 
Returning to Geneva, he obtained, by com- 
petitive examination, the professorship of 
aesthetics and French literature in the Acad- 
emy, — afterward exchanging it for that of 
moral philosophy. 

These few facts concerning the outward 
details of his life are gleaned from the in- 
troduction to the English translation of his 
Journal Intime, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. 



A SWISS THOREAU 5 

In all this, one might well ask, What re- 
semblance to Thoreau ? In environment 
none ; neither in those phases of character 
which outward conditions affect. In the 
natural man, in the original germ, unaltera- 
ble by any circumstances, lies the similarity. 

Neither of them was much known during 
his life-time ; but each, leading a solitary life, 
and feeling an irrepressible desire to express 
himself, confided his thoughts, his observa- 
tions of nature, his deepest experiences, to 
a journal. Thoreau left forty note-books ; 
Amiel, one of seventeen thousand folio 
pages. Each was a born observer, feeling 
that to see, and to reflect upon what he 
saw, was more his business than to take any 
active part in life ; and the delicate apprecia- 
tion and truthful and sympathetic statement 
of one so recall the other, that we might 
easily make the mistake of supposing that 
we were listening to some new excerpts 



6 A SWISS THOREAU 

made by Mr. Blake's indefatigable hand from 
the manuscripts of his friend, on hearing 
these passages from Amiel's journal : — 

" On May 14th, I saw the first glow worm 
of the season, in the turf beside the little 
winding road. It was crawling furtively 
under the grass, like a timid thought or a 
dawning talent." 

" Arachne's delicate webs were swaying in 
the green branches of the pine, little ball- 
rooms for the fairies, carpeted with powdered 
pearls, and kept in place by a thousand dewy 
strands hanging from above like the chains 
of a lamp, and supporting them from below 
like the anchors of a vessel. These little 
airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of 
the elf world, and all the vaporous freshness 
of dawn." 

" The middle of the day is like the middle 
of the night. There is no sound but the 
murmur of the flies, and on this summer 



A SWISS THOREAU 7 

noon life seems suspended just where it is 
most intense." 

"The hedges were hung with wild roses, 
the scent of the acacia perfumed the paths, 
and the light down of the poplar seeds 
floated in the air like a kind of fair-weather 
snow." 

" What message had this lake for me, with 
its sad serenity, its soft and even tranquillity, 
in which was mirrored the cold, monotonous 
pallor of mountains and clouds ? That dis- 
enchanted, disillusioned life may still be 
traversed by duty, lit by a memory of 
heaven." 

" The sky was hung with various shades of 
gray, and melancholy mists hovered over the 
distant mountains. . . . The half-stripped 
trees stood in their ragged splendor of dark 
red, scarlet, and yellow, and a few flowers 
still lingered, shedding their petals. Every 
landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul." 



8 A SWISS THOREAU 

Nothing was unattractive or meaningless 
in Nature's varied moods. Dull weather was 
to Amiel a sombre reverie of earth and sky. 
Thoreau worshipped the brown light of the 
sod when heaven offered him nothing 
brighter. Amiel loved the drifting mist. 

"The miles of country which were yester- 
day visible are to-day hidden under a thick 
gray curtain. . . . The fog transports me to 
Shetland, to Spitsbergen, to the Ossianic 
countries, where man, thrown back upon 
himself, feels his heart beat more quickly, 
and his thought expand more freely, — so 
long, at least, as he is not frozen and con- 
gealed by cold. . . . The sun, as it were, 
sheds us abroad, scatters and disperses us ; 
mist draws us together and concentrates us. 
It is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. 
. . . Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love 
each other better ; for the only reality then is 
the family, and, within the family, the heart." 



A SWISS THOREAU 9 

" Fog has certainly a poetry of its own, a 
grace, a dreamy charm. . . . The light mist 
hovering over the bosom of the plain is 
the image of that tender modesty which 
veils the features and shrouds the inmost 
thoughts of the maiden." 

He liked a quiet rainy day. It was like a 
song in a minor key. It revived his con- 
verse with himself. Under the gray sky 
he felt his life to its centre. To him it 
was " like those silences in worship which 
are not the empty moments of devotion, but 
the full moments." 

Both looked into curious, out-of-the-way 
places, and drew from them unexpected com- 
parisons. Thoreau delighted in watching the 
changing appearance of thawing sand-banks. 
Amiel says, — 

" I found in a hidden nook a sheet of fine 
sand, which the water had furrowed and 
folded like the pink palate of a kitten's 



10 A SWISS THOREAU 

mouth." When a sparrow once alighted 
on Thoreau's shoulder as he hoed the beans 
in a neighbor's field, he felt that it was the 
proudest epaulet he could have worn. It 
required a wider sympathy, a still more hos- 
pitable heart, to appreciate the little yellow- 
ish cat, ugly and pitiable, that followed Amiel 
into his room, and curled up in a chair beside 
him, seeming perfectly happy, as if he wanted 
nothing more. He says : " Far from being 
wild, nothing will induce him to leave me, 
and he has followed me from room to room 
all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable 
in the house, but what I have I give him : 
that is to say, a look and a caress. People 
have sometimes said to me that weak and 
feeble creatures are happy with me. ... It 
seems to me sometimes as though I could 
woo the birds to build in my beard, as they 
do in the headgear of some cathedral saint." 
To both the heart of nature was more 



A SWISS THOREAU II 

open than human hearts, and communion 
with her more satisfying than human inter- 
course. The idea of performance of any 
kind was not predominant in their theory of 
life. To dream was more truly living than 
to act. Thoreau withdrew into the woods in 
order really to live, to find out what life 
amounted to. He gives his idea of success 
in life in these words: "That your day and 
night be such that you greet them with joy ; 
that life shall emit a fragrance to you like 
flowers and sweet-scented herbs ; be elastic, 
starry, and immortal ! " — a definition which 
is complete without necessitating a relation 
to any other human being. 

Amiel says: " To open one's heart in 
purity to this ever pure nature, to allow this 
immortal life of things to penetrate into one's 
soul, is at the same time to listen to the 
voice of God. Sensation may be a prayer, 
and self-abandonment an act of devotion." 



12 A SWISS THOREAU 

And aofain : ' ' When we are doing - nothing 
in particular, it is then that we are living 
through all our being, and when we cease to 
add to our growth it is only that we may 
ripen and possess ourse" 

" Reverie is the Sunday of thought. In 
an inaction which is meditative and attentive, 
the wrinkles of the soul are smoothed away, 
and it spreads itself, unfolds, and springs 
afresh like the trodden grass of the road-side 
or the bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its 
injuries, becomes new. spontaneous, and 
original." 

Thoreau sat sometimes in a summer morn- 
ing in his sunnv doorwav from sunrise till 
noon, " rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines 
and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed 
solitude and stillness, while the birds san^ 
around or rlitted noiseless through the house. 
The dav advanced as if to liorht some work 
of mine ; it was morning, and now it is 



A SWISS THOREAU 13 

evening, and nothing memorable is accom- 
plished. This was sheer idleness to my 
fellow-townsmen, no doubt ; but if the birds 
and flowers had tried me by their standard, 
I should not have been found wanting. My 
life itself had become my amusement, and 
never ceased to be novel." 

In their introspection, in each one's critical 
study of himself, they resemble each other 
even more than in their appreciation of the 
natural world. To Thoreau, most affairs of 
general interest were mere dissipation. He 
shrank from action. To produce in any way 
was a demand the force of which he felt but 
lightly. Development of one's self, truth to 
one's ideal, were the only affairs of moment. 
If Amiel made a step toward action of any 
kind, the inner life seemed to him endan- 
gered. He was always eager to return from 
all participation in active life to his old habit 
of dreaming, to feel the River of Life rush 



14 A SWISS THOREAU 

by him, but he himself only like a statue on 
its bank. He writes: " All my published 
essays are little else than studies, games, 
exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. 
I play scales, as it were ; I run up and down 
my instrument ; I train my hand and make 
sure of its capacity. Satisfied with the power 
to act, I never arrive at the will to act." This 
reminds us of Thoreau's pencils. In assist- 
ing his father in the manufacture of lead 
pencils, he made an important discovery by 
which they could be very much improved. 
Upon a friend's congratulating him that he 
would make a fortune from it, he answered 
that his interest in the work was now over. 

Each found in himself so good a com- 
panion, that it often made him, as Thoreau 
remarks, poor company for another. This 
one being with whom he could, without sus- 
picion of intrusion, become thoroughly ac- 
quainted, possessed great interest for him. 



A SWISS THOREAU 15 

Each studied himself as a specimen of 
humanity, and, therefore, of general interest. 
Amiel says : "I am to the great majority of 
men what the circle is to rectilinear figures. 
I am everywhere at home because I have no 
particular and nominative self. Perhaps on 
the whole this defect has good in it. Though 
I am less of a man, I am perhaps nearer to 
the man, perhaps rather more man" Thus he 
confides to us the odd way in which he recon- 
ciles himself to his deficiencies. His free- 
dom of speech in this regard reminds one of 
Thoreau's saying, in one of his apathetic 
moods, that it was quite as much the business 
of the spirit to be seeking him, as his to be 
seeking the spirit. Amiel says: "Do no 
violence to yourself. Respect in yourself 
the oscillations of feeling. They are your 
life. One wiser than you ordained them." 

In both the loftiness of the ideal interfered 
with practical attainment. Amiel writes : "I 



16 A SWISS THOREAU 

cannot be content with second best. ... 1 
linger in the provisional, from timidity and 
from loyalty. . . . No special study interests 
me. What I wish to know is the sum of all 
knowledge. What I possess I must abso- 
lutely and wholly possess. I am afraid of 
only partially securing it. I have a horror 
of being duped — above all, duped by myself; 
and I would rather cut myself off from all 
life's joys than deceive or be deceived." 

Amiel often wondered if his pupils were 
pleased with his instructions. Their testi- 
mony is, that, although they loved and ad- 
mired the man, it could not be said that they 
enjoyed his lectures, on account of the 
peculiar ideas he held in regard to instruc- 
tion, — his stern fidelity to what he thought 
it proper to require of them. He considered 
that the bare facts he announced ought of 
themselves to prove of such interest as to 
secure their attention; saying: "I have 



A SWISS THOREAU 17 

never aimed at any oratorical success. I re- 
spect myself too much, and I respect my 
class too much, to attempt rhetoric. ... A 
lecturer has nothing to do with paying court 
to the scholars, or with showing off the 
master. ... I hate everything that savors of 
cajoling. ... A professor is the priest of 
his subject, and should do the honors of it 
gravely and with dignity." So, in his practi- 
cal work, he made no use of powers which 
would have enabled him to render the dullest 
subject clear and impressive. 

In regard to literary labor he writes : "To 
know is enough for me ; to attempt to ex- 
press seems often a kind of profanity. . . . 
If we are to give anything a form, we must, 
so to speak, be the tyrants of it. We must 
treat our subject brutally, and not be always 
trembling lest we are doing it a wrong. . . . 
This sort of confident effrontery is beyond 
me. My whole nature tends to that imper- 



18 A SWISS THOREAU 

sonality which respects and subordinates 
itself to the object. It is love of truth which 
holds me back from concluding and deciding. 
... I am afraid of having forgotten a point, 
of having exaggerated an expression, or 
having used a word out of place ; my pen 
stumbles at every line, so anxious am I to 
find the ideally best expression. ... I have 
always postponed the serious study of the 
art of writing, from a sort of awe of it and 
a secret love of its beauty." Thus he con- 
tinued to confide to his journal, rather than 
offer to the public, what he regarded as mere 
preparation for what he would sometime do. 

In regard to his indecision in action, he 
says of himself: " I remain motionless like a 
timid child, who, left alone in his father's 
laboratory, does not touch anything, for fear 
of springs, explosions, and catastrophes, 
which may burst from every corner at the 
least movement of his inexperienced hands." 



A SWISS THOREAU 19 

No such timidity restrained Thoreau from 
action. His outlook was always a cheery, 
confident one. 

The influence of early surroundings is so 
great in moulding the temperament, we can 
hardly say what either would have been in 
this respect if their positions had been 
exchanged. Thoreau was reared in the 
bosom of his own kindly family, in the neigh- 
borhood of the optimistic Emerson, of the 
congenial Alcott and Channing. He seems 
to have had that ingrained sunniness of dis- 
position which he attributed to his favorite 
pitch-pine. Everything was eminently satis- 
factory to him. He felt that he was born in 
the choicest spot of the inhabitable world, 
and " in the very nick of time." He could 
always catch a glimmer of light somewhere 
in the sky at any hour of the darkest night. 
Beneath the harsh moan of the sea he heard 
ever an undertone of purest melody. His 



■ 



20 A SWISS THOREAU 

own Yankee common sense, and that which 
surrounded him, restrained within wholesome 
limits peculiarities that might have attained a 
morbid development. He led a healthful 
life, including occasional active manual toil ; 
loved to chat with the wood-chopper and the 
farmer, fraternized most cordially with the 
Indian guides who accompanied him in his 
wilder expeditions, enjoyed the company of 
any man of native sense, and even one with- 
out sense. The pauper idiot who called 
upon him, and announced himself as wanting 
in that particular, pleased him by his inno- 
cent, ingenuous ways. He thought there 
might be a good basis for a true relation to 
men if all spoke with like simplicity. He 
could say, in his gay way, " I am no more 
lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a 
pasture, or a house-fly or a humble-bee." 
Troubles like Amiel's never overtook him. 
Of those two great modifiers of character, 



A SWISS THOREAU 21 

sickness and sorrow, he knew but little, — 
his only illness lasting but little more than a 
year, during which he was tenderly cared for 
by his devoted mother and sister. 

Amiel, with his frail health and sensitive 
disposition, was early bereft of his natural 
protectors and friends. Educated in the dark 
faith of Calvin, stepping, according to Renan, 
as the first act of his mature life, into a false 
position, since the professorship at Geneva 
confined him to the company of uncongenial 
associates, struggling for seven years against 
a most distressing malady (a complication of 
asthma and heart-disease), — who can won- 
der that he was at times overcome with de- 
spondency ? With what marvellous elasticity 
he rebounded from it, recovering himself, 
" becoming again young and aspiring ! " 

His life was chiefly that of a solitary 
thinker. His contact with German thought 
in the years he spent at Berlin only strength- 



22 A SWISS THOREAU 

ened the natural tendencies of his subtle, 
searching spirit, and made practical life 
more than ever distasteful. Schopenhauer's 
oriental ideas fascinated him, but his funda- 
mental belief that all being is evil he never 
shared, — replying derisively to the state- 
ment that "Life is an insatiable thirst," — 
" Our hunger and our thirst are not what 
men claim of us, but our bread and our 
gourd." He was dismayed to find how per- 
fectly he represented Schopenhauer's typical 
man, " for whom the individual life is a mis- 
fortune from which impersonal contemplation 
is the only enfranchisement." " Yet," said 
he, "deep within this ironical and disap- 
pointed being of mine there is a child hidden, 
a frank, sad, simple creature who believes in 
the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all 
heavenly illusions." According to our hu- 
man judgment, he had more than his share 
of the afflictions of this life ; but tested by 



A SWISS THOREAU 23 

his own philosophy there is in this fact no 
cause for regret. It favored the develop- 
ment of his character ; especially it made him 
more sympathetic. In his earlier days he 
had said of himself: " I am individual in the 
presence of men, objective in the presence 
of things. I attach myself to the object, 
and absorb myself in it. I detach myself 
from subjects (persons), and hold myself on 
my guard against them. I feel myself dif- 
ferent from the mass of men and akin to 
the great whole of Nature." So intensely 
interested was he sometimes in an animal 
or a plant, that all personality of his own 
seemed merged in the image which it formed 
in him ; he lived only in its life. In a 
luminous, serene morning, he was beguiled 
out of himself, dissolved in sunbeams, 
breezes, perfumes. He even felt himself at 
times returning to an elemental state, as if a 
vague, formless, undetermined life flowed 






24 A SWISS THOREAU 

through him. In his later years this power 
of entering into other lives drew him more 
towards persons. He says, " We are struck 
by something bewildering and ineffable when 
we look down into the depths of an abyss, — 
and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love 
and pity. A sort of sacred emotion descends 
upon me whenever I penetrate the recesses 
of this sanctuary of man, and hear the gentle 
murmur of the prayers, hymns, and supplica- 
tions which rise from the hidden depths of 
the heart. . . . This experience seems to me 
as wonderful as poetry, and divine with the 
divineness of birth and dawn. . . . Every 
characteristic individuality shapes itself ideally 
in me, moulds me for the moment into its 
own image." 

Amiel felt keenly deprivations of which no 
words of Thoreau's give any hint. He 
mourned that he was never a father, and 
that he had all his life waited in vain for the 



A SWISS THOREAU 2$ 

woman and the work capable of taking entire 
possession of him and becoming his end and 
aim. " Love," he says, " could have done 
everything with me. By myself and for my- 
self, I prefer to be nothing/' 

In speaking of children, he says : " These 
80,000 daily births, of which statistics tell us, 
represent an infusion of innocence and fresh- 
ness, struggling not only against the death 
of the race, but against human corruption. 
. . . Without fatherhood, without mother- 
hood, I think that love itself would not pre- 
vent men from devouring each other. . . . 
What little of Paradise we still see on earth 
is due to the presence of children among us." 

He so reverenced the nature of a woman 
that it was a fact altogether past his compre- 
hending that any woman could be otherwise 
than beautiful in appearance. It shocked 
him " like a solecism or a dissonance." 

Women and children are not often men- 



26 A SWISS THOREAU 

tioned in Thoreau's notes. One cannot 
easily forget, however, his graphic description 
of a child he saw in a cabin, where he took 
refuge one day when overtaken by a heavy 
thunder-shower : " The wrinkled, sibyl-like, 
cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's 
knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked 
out from its home, in the midst of wet and 
hunger, inquisitively, upon the stranger, with 
the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it 
was the last of a noble line and the hope and 
cynosure of the world, instead of John Field's 
poor starveling brat." We must admit that 
its points are artistically presented, since it 
vividly calls up many a similar image. But 
how wanting is he in recognition of the 
respect due to this newly arrived celestial 
visitor ! 

He ridiculed the Cape-Cod women, and 
especially one, whom he described as " like 
a man-of-war's man in petticoats, whose voice 



A SWISS THOREAU 27 

sounded as if she were talking to you through 
a breaker." It may have been all true, but it 
is not what Amiel would have seen in her. 

Amiel's was certainly a more emotional, — 
was it not also a richer, more joyous nature 
than Thoreau's ? Could any one be so uni- 
formly, steadily cheerful as the latter without 
a kind of stolidity as basis for it, some want 
of sensitiveness ; or, should we say, a rare 
freedom from morbid sensitiveness ? 

Thoreau was especially exhilarated and de- 
lighted by all the phenomena of winter. Its 
cold purity seems to mirror his life. Amiel 
rejoiced in the sunbeam, in fragrance, in the 
butterfly and the rose. In his favorite La 
Fontaine were two omissions ; — there was 
neither butterfly nor rose. He had always 
an eye for butterflies, and never failed to 
notice them, and to delight in their spon- 
taneity, their enjoyment of the passing hour, 
in contrast with his own painfully studied 



28 A SWISS THOREAU 

ways, recording in his diary as one of the 
important events of his life the visit three 
butterflies paid him when he was resting 
under a tree one summer noon, and the de- 
lightful reverie they awakened in him. As 
he watched them flying from flower to flower, 
over hill and dale, he threw off his load of 
care, and remembered that " the soul too is 
a butterfly." When these airy creatures dis- 
appeared from the landscape, he saw in the 
sea-gulls gigantic butterflies hovering over 
the waves. 

One of Thoreau's last remarks was that he 
felt "no regret" in leaving this life. Amiel 
used the same expression, explaining his 
feelings more fully. Neither had acted with 
the least reference to the opinion of others. 
Amiel, in casting his last glance backward, 
doubted if this had been the true course. 
" It would have been such a joy to me," he 
says, " to have been smiled upon, welcomed, 



A SWISS THOREAU 29 

encouraged, and to obtain what I was so 
ready to give, kindness and good-will. But 
to hunt down consideration and reputation, 
to force the esteem of others, seemed to me 
an effort unworthy of myself. Notwithstand- 
ing my intense consciousness of having ac- 
complished so little, I do not think I have 
been wholly wrong. I have been throughout 
in harmony with my best self. . . . One busi- 
ness we have in this world is to see that our 
own type is neither altered nor degraded." 

Although never wholly losing the impres- 
sion of his early religious instruction, the 
constant presence of the one sympathizing 
Spirit for whom he recorded all his experi- 
ences was the great reality to him. His 
reveries were a silent converse with this one 
unfailing Friend. " I have been dreaming," 
he says, " my head in my hands. About what ? 
About happiness. I have been asleep, as it 
were, on the fatherly breast of God." 



30 A SWISS THOREAU 

In his ramblings he once happened upon 
the little churchyard at Clarens, called " The 
Oasis." It was surrounded by deep, mys- 
terious woods, but between the branches of 
the trees he caught glimpses of misty moun- 
tains and the tender blue of the lake. Above 
him was a noise of wings, the murmur of 
birds ; butterflies and roses were all about 
him. In that peaceful spot death seemed to 
him like sleep ; a sleep instinct with hope. 
It is there that he rests. 



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